Tillerson: North Korea Military Options ‘Ready to Go’

The Secretary of State said that Trump's tweets were a warning to North Korea.

By NTK Staff | 10.15.2017 @10:10am

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday that the United States had military options on North Korea “ready to go.”

Discussing tweets from President Trump that seemed to target Tillerson, the secretary said that the president was instead directing the tweets at Pyongyang and U.S. partners in the region.

“What the president is doing is he’s trying to motivate action on a number of people’s part, in particular the regime in North Korea,” he said. “I think he does want to be clear with Kim Jong-un and that regime in North Korea that he has military preparations ready to go and he has those military options on the table and we have spent substantial time actually perfecting those.”

Tillerson added that Trump does want to see a diplomatic solution to the crisis, saying that negotiations would continue “until the first bomb drops.”

Trump had tweeted at the beginning of this month, seeming to warn his secretary off of negotiation:

I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man…